Taken

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AMY BIANCOLLI, Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle |
January 29, 2009

Liam Neeson plays a retired spy who leaves a trail of dead bodies as he searches for his daughter's abductors in Taken.

Any parent could relate to Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), the retired super-spy at the center of Taken. All he wants is what's best for Kim, his 17-year-old daughter (Maggie Grace). Divorced from her mother and overshadowed by her filthy-rich stepfather, he would, he says, ``sacrifice anything for her.''

Specifically, he would kill each and every scum he meets in Paris. The number he does on the City of Lights is comparable, corpse-for-corpse, to any damage wreaked by Jason Bourne. With one key difference: Jason has a conscience, or wishes he did. Bryan has none. I mean none. The only life that means anything to him is Kim’s, and when she gets nabbed by Albanian sex traffickers on a trip abroad, Bryan hops on a plane and lays waste to gay Paree.

“You can’t just run around tearing up Paris!” whines a French colleague (Olivier Rabourdin). Au contraire, Bryan says: “I’ll tear down the Eiffel Tower if I have to.”

Clench-jawed action star is a new gig for Neeson, but the Man Who Was Schindler has long worn the mantle of heroism. The twist this time is an utter lack of moral complexity. He’s a dad, and he’s a killing machine, and that’s it.

This blindered characterization makes for a driving premise and a few interesting scenes, but it gets to be a bore after the shock wears off. If he’ll kill or maim just about anyone, where’s the suspense?

It’s less Neeson’s fault, or even director Pierre Morel’s, than the movie’s co-writers: Robert Mark Kamen and the entertainingly shlocky Luc Besson, who also produced. The Besson-Kamen writing team gave us The Fifth Element, all three Transporters and, most recently, a little Norwegian-Mexican comic Western called Bandidas. They’re just the men for high-gloss knockabout bloodshed.

So Bryan shoots people. He knifes them. He snaps their necks, sprays them with hot steam and chases them onto highway ramps where they’re conveniently smooshed by oncoming traffic. He electrocutes a guy for information, then flips on the switch and leaves. He wings a lady whose only crime is cooking him a nice chicken dinner — and being married to the wrong man.The film’s single most effective scene is the tense trans-Atlantic sequence when Kim, on the phone with her father, sees her airhead friend (Katie Cassidy) abducted in a Parisian flat and realizes the kidnappers are coming for her next. As Bryan instructs his daughter to scream identifying characteristics (height, hair color, tattoos) into her cell, the camera looks squarely at Neeson’s pale brow and watery blue eyes. He doesn’t cry; his face is gripped not by immobilizing grief but by pragmatism, professionalism and the need to act immediately.

After he arrives in France, there’s a bit of quirk with a fellow hired to translate Albanian. What a nifty touch — hey, Bourne never hired a temp. For a minute there, movie begins to approximate real-world logic. But then Bryan starts arguing with the Albanians in English, and they argue back in English, and at no point does anyone smack himself in the head and say, “Duh?! Isn’t this France?” Bryan doesn’t even arouse suspicion when he infiltrates the sex traders’ kitchen as a faux French agent and proceeds to boss everyone around in Anglais.

Generally, scenes begin with Bryan entering a building and end with a tangled splay of bodies. The fight choreography is fast, fatal and nonstop: raw meat for action devotees.

But if it’s unrepentant violence you’re after, you’re better off renting Morel’s 2004 collaboration with Besson, District B13. It boasts lots of the same elements (Paris setting, inky crime, corrupt cops and a butt-kicking avenger out to rescue a kidnapped female relative), plus the exhilaration of Parkour chase scenes and the honesty of a hard-R rating.

Despite the savagery of its violence, Taken is PG-13. That alone should give a parent cause to worry — especially Bryan.